Stories explain societies.
An anthropological definition of culture says that a culture consists of all the customs, ideas and structures that obtain in a society and that are consistent with one another so that it constitutes a distinctive world view. Such cultures predominate in pre-literate societies and the concept is extended to include ethnic groups or nations which have similar characteristics. A sociological definition of culture separates culture from other institutions or functions of society such as production or distribution or norms. The culture is the set of values by which a population is guided, the presumption that values are necessary so that they people can act in that people cannot be conceived as operating from reason or self interest alone. This definition of culture, whereby cultural objects are largely for the purpose of maintaining order, are characteristic of industrialized societies. A third definition of culture might be called literary. It concerns the number of objects and performances created so as to entertain and enlighten the populace or some section of it, like opera, and so are autonomous in that the creations are the result of a coterie or social calling of some part of the population whether it is to entertain or to enlighten. This kind of culture is overtly and self consciously created and some people in handicraft industries can turn their talents, such as weaving or graffiti, into works of art recognized as such and so take on a distinct kind of being, as an artwork, whether or not they receive remuneration from their efforts, are different from its function and so not dependant, as Stalinists would say, as a kind of production useful as are other workers.
The point I wish to make about this third kind of culture, that is as old as “Gilgamesh” and remains quite active, is that it can explain the other two types of culture and is founded in history and so documented rather than regarded as having existed in a society from the start, as when historians thought that the Lowland countries came from their swamps rather than their writers or Henri Frankfort thought that Egyptian culture emerged from large spaces, these consistent with the first definition of culture. The usefulness of the third approach can be consulted by reviewing some of the great themes that emerge from the artistic artifacts.
A grand theme is a short summary of the arc of a plot that sums up and educates its readers about the basic way the history of a civilization works. This arc seems the most natural and obvious way both history and present day events and feelings emerge even if it includes some harsh realities. A good example of a grand theme is the repeated stories of exile and return that characterize the distinctive Jewish civilization. Moses led his people from Egypt to his Holy Land to the East. The Jews came back to their homeland after the Babylonian Captivity. Indeed, scholars claim that the redactors of the Old Testament were done with this grand theme in mind as a result lof their recent experience. Jews for millennia chanted “Next year in Jerusalem” so as to remind them of their exile, the latest return to Israel having occurred only in the last hundred years.
The matching of a theme to history or literature may not be perfect for it to remain as a guiding principle. “Exodus” does not explain how the Hebrews found themselves in Egypt, a foreign people in their midst, though we can think Jews came to Egypt as a result of Joseph becoming the czar of foodstuffs during a period of famine. Moreover, the land of milk and honey conquered by the Israelites seems foreign territory rather than already familiar. Jews in exile had been so for so long that Reform Jews in the nineteenth century reconceptualized themselves as a Christian type religion, which meant an association of believers rather than an ethnicity, and so no need to return to Israel. But even Reform Jews in the twentieth century became overwhelmed by this grand theme and so came to support the state of Israel without wanting to jin their brethren in the eastern Mediterranean.
Moreover, a grand theme may not be an origin story that has always been part of a people’s understanding but develops over time. The early parts of “Genesis” are about a different grand theme: that of catastrophe and survival. Adam and Eve suffer the catastrophe of being expelled from Eden and then have to manage by Adam sweating on his brow and Eve experiencing labor pains. That is the new life. Noah endures the catastrophe of the Flood and the Bible story goes on to ell what happens to him after he is resettled in the world: he becomes a drunk and develops bad relations with one of his sons. Babel encounters the catastrophe of losing a single tongue and all of us since then have to adjust to that.
More so, there may be different grand themes that exist simultaneously until one of them becomes overwhelmingly convincing. The story of Joseph can be thought of not as an exile who is reunited with his people though in a different land but as an immigrant who with luck and pluck was able to rise to the top, in which case that is to follow a different grand theme, the one adopted by America as its grand theme, which is that we are all immigrants who have managed to make well in our own land of milk and honey, “The Godfather” a stark reminder, a moral lesson, of what happens when a promising figure looks back and engages in the way of life of previous immigrants.
Grand themes can also be variations on older grand themes, a new civilization altering the grand theme of a different civilization so as to create a distinctive and bold alternative understanding of what a culture is fated to be forever retold.That happens in Christianity which modifies collective exile and return, a political and social matter however deeply felt, with personal exile and return in that people are exiled from their own nature because of the Fall and then can return to peace and tranquility wherever they reside by acknowledging Jesus as their savior, whether in Him as a mystical person or as a moral exemplar whereby people have now become spiritually free. The arc switches with crucial matters: whether law will be replaced by the spirit of the law and whether past and current metaphysical events take place, as is the case in Catholicism, or whether, as in Protestantism, salvation or not rages within each psyche, whether to surrender to Christ’s soul rather than his being the Son of God.
Other civilizations have very different and independent grand themes. The Iliad has war as its topic. Its great theme is about whether a person is or can become a hero. Achilles has to choose between a long life or a heroic life, as most people in combat also face. And there are different kinds of heroes or can be honored as such even if their qualities are not readily apparent as admirable. Odysseus is sly and Priam is dutiful. People shine in different ways and, to be generous, a great many people can become heroic and so out of the ordinary because of their character traits which lead to particularly decisive engagement with the world. Nietzsche considered heroism as a particularly Greek issue and the Iliad is a way to display or fail to display it. A story is an opportunity to display that and Plato displayed again and again the heroism of Socrates and others to parry their wit so as to conquer opinion with truth, which is an application of heroism that leads to the extension of sci9ence, a method of inquiry the Hebrews never explored. There seems to be a connection.
The Odyssey has as its topic a post war world, and so is akin to “The Best Years of Our Lives” and the second half of “Gone With the Wind”. How will the veterans adjust to the aftermath of the war? The grand theme is that survivors both at war and on the homefront remain loyal to their pre-war allegiances despite temptations to do otherwise. Helen goes back to Menelaus. Penelope resists the suitors. Telemachus looks for his father. Odysseus goes back to Ithaca despite the temptations of Circe. People are admired for the persistence of their loyalty as a kind of duty even if it is just custom in that it is thought inevitable, but is nevertheless heroic. The idea of loyalty as an end in itself is an element of stoicism that finds its way not only into Roman culture, as in Seneca, but also in Chrtistian thinking
European nations presented themselves as civilizations and had specific grand themes that sum up and further their preoccupations. The English culture is laden with the separation of the social classes and how to overcome them. It dominates the nineteenth century novel but goes as far back as ”Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” where a knight who is decidedly minor proves himself to become accomplished as a courtier by achieving feats of courtesy falling short only in sleeping with a woman which is excused perhaps because that is thee way of the world. But I do not know that “Beowulf”, earlier on, was not into the niceties of politesse, but was more like cave people huddled around their campfires to become warm and ward off animals. The theme is fear and foreboding, a very unhappy tale.
France also has a distinctive grand theme. It is about hiding and then revealing an inner self, perhaps because it is so entranced with the pomp and ceremony that emphasize externality. It begins, as most French things do, with Descartes, who wanted to shed the artifacts of self down to its bedrock reality, revealing that at the heart of self was consciousness, that “I think, therefore I am”, an axiomatic postu;late on which people can stand as indubitable and firm. Subsequent French thinkers modify and challenge the primacy of the self. Pascal shatters it with his wager. If you arise in heaven knowing God to be sovereign, then you had been wrong as a matter of fact from what you had believed otherwise, what had been in your soul. I would surmise, facing the pearly gates, to give in to fact and abjure whatever you had believed previously. Facts triumph over self even if they had been honestly arrived at so that a conscientious atheist could reasonably have believed there was no God and would not be respected for his conscientious posture. Moreover, Pascal’s Wager means that any fantastic claim has to be given credence lest it might be true and so every self is always in terror and so not much is left of the autonomy of the self.
Another attack on the autonomy, and self certain existence of the self comes in a very different direct6ion in the nineteenth century from Emile Durkheim. He does not counterpose the self with what Pascal regards as facts which are just superstitions but with norms, which are the current moment of a cultural more. The self is beaten up by norms in every which way. If you engage too much in a norm, you are liable to engage in altruistic suicide, like a kamikaze pilot. Or if you are too disengaged with norms, you are anomic, which means unanchored and drifting. Not too much or too little but just right which makes you always anxious, which is always an emotion that counters the certainty and solidity of the self, dismembering it into a puddle.
An additional way the French unravel selfhood is offered by twentieth century Existentialists. Albert Camus thought that after you peel off the onion of pretense down to its core, there is nothing left. The protagonist--hardly the hero-- of “L’Etranger” has no feeling, even about his mother’s death. He is soulless, an d so the opposite of the solid ground of self or ego.
And so the French careen away from what was established as fundamental thought in different forms of negation and so each of them and collectively grand themes about the conflict between self and life. But the French, however, have not always been wedded as a core concept and story to the dynamics of selfhood. Rather, “The Song of Roland” is a prior and seminal figure of the French grand theme and it is not preoccupied with selfhood even if some historians and anthropologists insist that every nation from its origins had such a grand theme, as when nineteenth century historians thought that the people of the low countries are preoccupied with pushing back the floods from a marshy area. The grand theme for the song lof roland is chivalry which means something very different from the English “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which means politesse or manners, but is concerned with how to carry out warfare, echoing back to the Iliad that warfare is a sly and brutal affair and to be chivalric means to engage in that dirty business such as sending their people as hostages to their enemy, these people to be sacrificed when the ruse is revealed.
Exhibiting a set of grand themes may seem obvious and faces the objections that one could characterize a civilization as otherwise and could select different literary and historical works to suit one’s case, but the advantage is that this approach allows for evidence and of change. A civilization can be one way or another and need not remain stable as if it is what is called a culture that can be traced to customs established long ago and which never change, Germans doing what they do since before Tacitus and finding notg too distant German atrocities as inevitably in their cultural nature. I would prefer to think that Germany understands itself and has for a very long time been fractured and then unified, its latest unification setting off its present regime in 1989 when East and West Germany unified after the end of the Cold War. Similarly, the story of America as the accommodation of immigrants to America’s advantage is presently challenged by thinking of Americans as an ethnicity rather than disparate peoples united under the Constitution.